Amazon is the latest tech giant to embrace nuclear power as it pushes to deliver electricity-hungry artificial intelligence programs.
Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing unit of the Seattle-based e-retailer, said Wednesday it will invest more than half a billion dollars in three projects: one in Washington state, one in Virginia and one in Pennsylvania.
The Virginia-Washington state agreements require AWS to provide funding for energy companies to explore the feasibility of adding small modular reactors to existing power plants.
In return, Amazon will receive the right to purchase power from an initial installation of four small modular reactors.
Energy Northwest, a consortium of public utilities, will have the ability to add up to eight 80 MW modules, resulting in a total capacity of up to 960 MW, or enough to power the equivalent of more than 770,000 U.S. homes .
The additional power would be available to Amazon and utilities to power homes and businesses.
AWS reaches agreement with Virginia utility to build a small modular nuclear reactor near an existing power plant in Louisa County.
A small modular reactor (SMR) is smaller in size and capacity compared to traditional nuclear reactors.
‘Modular’ means they can be produced in factories and transported to sites for assembly, allowing more flexible deployment and potentially reducing construction time and costs.
“Our agreements will encourage the construction of new nuclear technologies that will generate energy for decades to come,” said Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services.
SMRs will have their components built in a factory to reduce construction costs. Today’s larger reactors are built on site. Critics of SMRs say they will be too expensive to achieve the desired economies of scale.
Nuclear power, which generates electricity with virtually no greenhouse gas emissions and provides good-paying union jobs, has broad support from both Democrats and Republicans.
But no US SMRs exist yet. NuScale, the only U.S. company with an SMR design license from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, had to abandon its first SMR project last year to build its technology at a U.S. laboratory in Idaho.
In addition, SMRs will produce long-lasting radioactive nuclear waste for which the US does not yet have a permanent repository.
Scott Burnell, a spokesman for the American NRC, said no details of the planned SMRs have yet been presented to the regulator.
Google said Monday it has signed the world’s first corporate agreement to buy power from multiple small modular reactors to meet electricity demand for artificial intelligence.
The technology company’s agreement with Kairos Power aims to bring Kairos’ first small modular reactor online by 2030, followed by additional deployments through 2035.
The companies did not disclose financial details about the deal or where in the U.S. the factories would be built.
Google said it has agreed to buy a total of 500 megawatts of power from six to seven reactors, which is smaller than the output of current nuclear reactors.
Last month, Microsoft and Constellation Energy signed a power deal to revive a unit at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, the site of America’s worst nuclear accident in 1979.
U.S. data center power consumption is expected to roughly triple between 2023 and 2030 and will require about 47 gigawatts of new generation capacity, according to estimates from Goldman Sachs, which assumed natural gas, wind and solar energy would fill the gap.
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